Sigmund Freud, Please Phone Home
by Elizabeth Jacques
Always after a good night's snooze, hubby G-man and I awake, and this is the exchange that follows: He stretches and laughs, and I yawn and say, "OK, Mr. Rich Imagination. Tell me about your dream."
I'm not sure what goes on in G-Man's subconscious during his nocturnal flights of fancy, but I can tell you this: The guy has one wacko cinema reeling in his head throughout the night.
G-Man's early morning description of one particular dream so fascinated me that I've not been able to let go of it. What was the meaning of the symbolism therein? How does one explain the mysterious sub-cortical thoughts that obviously had my dear husband's mind a muddle? Mr. Freud, where are you when we need you?
As he slept, G-Man rambled around (in his head, of course) in a big house with many rooms. As he rambled he suddenly noticed there was a huge blister on his arm--a really big, mama-jama-tumor-thing sitting on his elbow. So, after feeling around on this puffy protuberance for a minute, he punctured it with the tines of a fork.
As you might imagine, an effusion of stuff began to gush from the punctured blister. Now before any dream interpreters start in on this, we must present the rest of the story, for the efflux was far from run-of-the-mill. Streaming from four tiny holes, much to G-Man's amazement, was a flow of onions and gravy.
He was so captivated with this unusual sight that he ran to another room to find an empty toothpaste tube. He unscrewed the cap and began to try to suck the onions and gravy into the tube. This was a difficult task, and he didn't finish before the alarm clock awoke him. And then it was that he began to share his interesting vision with me.
Attempting to help him figure all this out, I went online to a site that promised to help visitors interpret dreams. The instructions said: "In the boxes below, please enter three important words or symbols from your dream. We will then give you an interpretation." So I did. In the first box I typed "onions." In the second box I typed "gravy." I finally settled on "blister" for the third box because that was the way G-Man described his bump. You know what? The folks sitting on the other end of my computer wires had no clue. They sent their interpretation back totally blank.
What to do? Maybe, I thought, I've got the third blank wrong. I deleted "blister" and typed "toothpaste tube." Still no interpretation. Whoa boy, we'd flat stumped those suckers. I mean, here were skilled dream interpreters who could cover symbols all the way from aardvarks to zymometers, and they'd never dealt with onions and gravy and toothpaste tubes before.
So much for the so-called authorities. I'm willing to bet I get valid explanations from several NakedHumorist readers. The best interpretation gets a prize. I haven't decided what the prize should be, but I'm leaning toward a free meal at a nice little cafe -- maybe a big thick hamburger steak smothered with . . . naaaah.
© 2001 by Elizabeth Jacques; all rights reserved.
Spider Man
by Don Kelley
"Don," my wife will say. "There's a spider on the bathroom ceiling. Would you take care of it?"
Women, in general, are soft, kind, caring creatures. They shun violence and empathize with all living things.
Except spiders. When those little critters emerge in our homes, women become a strange amalgam of Little Miss Muffet and General Patton. When my wife asks me to "take care" of the eight-legged visitor to our bathroom, she doesn't expect me to feed it a bowl of warm soup or read it a bedtime story. She wants it crushed, killed, expunged, and preferably flushed.
I often wonder why. I suspect most guys are like me: we see a spider on the wall and we think, Hey, there's a spider on the wall. But we know that the best (i.e., easiest) course of action is to walk away. In an hour or two the spider will have moved, out of sight and way out of mind. Problem solved.
Now, I'll admit that some bug species give me the creeps. The sight of a monster cockroach running across the floor is enough to send my fight-or-flight response off the charts. There are roaches, I'm sure, that would qualify for the Boston Marathon. But spiders on the other hand are slow, poky, ponderous little guys, and I'm pretty sure I could outrun one.
Women could too, if they tried. But no, an immediate death sentence is the only answer. Here's a typical story. The nice lady who sits in the next cubicle at work once startled me with this announcement:
"Yuck! There's a spider in my phone, right in that space where you hang up. Ugh!" I heard her tell a few other people about it, then all became silent. As the minutes ticked by, my tension increased. I had to find out. "Uh, Diane?" I asked over the cubicle wall. "Where is the spider now?"
"Crumpled up in a tissue in my wastebasket," Diane said matter-of-factly, then smiled in a guilt-free, Miss Muffet/General Patton sort of way.
The horror.
If only women could see this side of themselves. If only...wait, here's an idea!
I got it from a movie, a cute kids' film called Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves. In it, the shrink-ray inventor's wife spies a Daddy Long Legs lounging peacefully on her kitchen wall. Naturally, she wants it dead. She prepares to attack. But then the phone rings and Daddy slips away.
Later she is accidentally reduced to a fraction of her former height and encounters the same spider, now a towering giant spider. The spider does not attack her. The woman chats with it and in return, the spider gives her a lift from the floor to the nearest countertop. She thanks Daddy profusely and comes away with a better understanding of her tiny houseguest.
So here's my idea. We take all of the world's women, shrink them down (temporarily, of course) and have them rub elbows, hobnob and banter with a spider or two. Just think of the good this will do. Spider persecution, like the witch hunts, will become a thing of the past. Women can return to their inherently gentle ways.
And guys like me can finally finish the sports section in peace.
Don Kelley has been happily married for eight years and has two wonderful children, a boy and a girl. No pets at the moment, but the kids would love a dog. When not writing, he works for state government as a labor market analyst. He would like to write a nonfiction book someday. In the meantime, he's had one book review published in a newspaper, about which Don brags: Hey, it's a start! Some of his work can be found at Thought Cafe.
© 2001 by Don Kelley; all rights reserved.
